It is widely acknowledged that viewing images in the form of a single-media or multi-media thematic presentation, referred to herein as a “story,” or a hardcopy thematic album is much more compelling than browsing through a number of random hard-copy prints, or looking at a random series of static images presented sequentially using a slide projector, computer, or television. The selective addition of other elements to the presentation such as a sound track appropriate to the content of the images, the insertion of interesting transitions between the images, the addition of video or of various video-style special effects including fades and dissolves, image-collaging, backgrounds and borders, and colorization makes the presentation much more interesting to the viewer and can greatly enhance the emotional content of the images being presented. The proliferation in the home of new television-based viewing platforms able to accommodate multimedia, including DVD, Video CD players, home media servers, and high definition digital displays also increases the demand for this type of story or presentation.
For the ordinary photographic consumer, the creation of a multimedia presentation or album of still images is not presently very easy or convenient. The selection and layout of digital image assets can be a significant and time-consuming process. Even if the images are available in digital form, a consumer must have facility with multimedia authoring software tools such as Macromedia Director™ or Adobe Premier™ in order to create such a presentation. These software tools, while very flexible, are aimed more at the professional presentation creator, have multiple functional options, and require a great deal of time and experience to develop the skill needed to use them to advantage. More recently, template-based multimedia presentation applications such as Photojam™, offered by Shockwave.com™, or PC-based “movie making” applications such as Apple's i-Movie™ have become available. While these applications can simplify the creation of multimedia presentations for a consumer, they do not help to automate many of the story making options. Current applications often require the user to select a presentation theme and to select the assets, such as pictures, video, and music; that are used to automatically generate an image product. In addition, these applications offer no way to automatically generate an image product such as for special occasions, holidays, anniversaries, or for selected other events or calendar dates.
Thus, there remains a need for an automated authoring system where an inexperienced user can receive an automatically generated single-media or multimedia story and obtain copies of the presentation over a variety of channels and in a variety of formats suitable for various types of presentation devices.